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Buddhism

“One way to make a convincing poetic voice is to display the mind in motion, or the mind changing direction as it speaks. We like to say “I changed my mind,” but the human mind alters its direction so rapidly and constantly, we might as well say “My mind changed me.”–Tony Hoagland, The Art of Voice

For the first time in a long time, I read a real, physical book. I suddenly felt conspicuous reading while flying, holding a book in my hands, about which everyone could make assumptions just by reading the title. Reading while flying. It was a book on Buddhism, so make of that what you will. Unfortunately for me, I was seated by a very strange man who kept sliding his hand down his trousers while drinking at least five glasses of cranberry juice. I am not sure whether he was pleasuring himself or somehow trying to relieve a bladder infection by touch. Either way, it was a relief to escape him as well as to finish the book in the course of one flight.

Like every autumn in recent memory, this one has been filled with travel, and this won’t taper off until late November. I don’t think I have ever wanted to *just stay home* as much as I do right now.

October wasn’t spectacularly productive in the reading department but here’s my very brief report anyway.

Thoughts on reading for October:

I had good intentions for producing a full blog post on my reading in October, but it didn’t quite work as I wished. I have too many other things going on, so I don’t read quite as many books, and even if I read the same amount, I don’t have the time to reflect and write about them in quite the same way. And there were other things, important things, happening. Like spending time in Prague and meeting with dearest A as well as more adventures with my brother, so I can’t really claim that shortchanging a blog no one reads is going to make any difference.

Highly recommended

“The idea that writerly originality appears from nowhere, or exists as something in isolation, a thing to be guarded and protected from influence, is lunacy. Anyone who doesn’t school themselves by deep, wide, and idiosyncratic reading is choosing aesthetic poverty. Such aesthetic cloistering is like protecting your virginity in the belief that it will make you better at sex.” –The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice – Tony Hoagland

Sadly I didn’t read anything that I thought was so great I’d need to recommend it. Maybe, at a push, I’d say The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice by Tony Hoagland. I am not normally moved by books that aim to “instruct” one on how to write or develop voice, but this was an exception – probably just because Hoagland’s own voice is unique.

Nothing particularly new given all my previous disciplines of study, but nevertheless a good reminder of how very different various groups define “globalization” – and what the consequences of those different definitions can be.

Entertaining/informative/thoughtful or some combination thereof

“I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo’s tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo. Again and again I saw the phenomenon repeated. The meanest girls, the ones who started secret clubs to ostracize the poorly dressed, delighted to see Cinderella triumph over her stepsisters. They rejoiced when the prince kissed her. Evidently, they not only saw themselves as noble and good, but also wanted to love and be loved. Maybe not by anyone and everyone, the way I wanted to be loved. But, for the right person, they were prepared to form a relation based on mutual kindness. This meant that the Disney portrayal of bullies wasn’t accurate, because the Disney bullies realized they were evil, prided themselves on it, and loved nobody.”

I keep thinking I like Batuman but it’s truer to say that I really, really like short passages. She makes keen observations now and then that are lovely.

“Katalin, who was seventeen, was beautiful, with waist-length flaxen hair and a perfectly plain face. Why was “plain” a euphemism for “ugly,” when the very hallmark of human beauty was its plainness, the symmetry and simplicity that always seemed so young and so innocent. It was impossible not to think that her beauty was one of the most important things about her—something having to do with who she really was.“

But then the rest of it reads like someone’s college diary. And everything I’ve read that she’s written feels like a slightly different version of that very same thing. I related to it to some extent because she’s writing about university in the early 90s, studying Russian/Eastern European stuff and the infancy of email, when we were assigned email addresses by our universities but didn’t really understand how the magic happened when these mysterious digital messages just appeared.

Coincidences

I don’t think I ran into anything exceptionally coincidental in my reading except for the fact that there was a long passage in The New Social Face of Buddhism in which the infamous Milgram and Zimbardo psychological experiments are cited (as they always are when examining ethical missteps). It’s tangentially coincidental because I never remember the name “Milgram” and Mr Firewall, who has never studied psychology, but did see a thinly veiled takeoff on the Milgram story in an old episode of Law & Order: SVU (with the late Robin Williams as guest star), always remembers the name now.

Also, it being a book about Buddhism, there is a whole lot of stuff about mindfulness, which is something that comes up constantly and which Firewall hates.

I was therefore able to tell him that even in this book on Buddhism there were things for him in it.

Biggest disappointment (or hated/disliked)

I don’t think I read anything I hated or felt great disappointment about.